


Lark

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Childhood, Day and Night, Doctor John, Doctor John Watson, John is a Very Good Doctor, Post The Great Game, chronobiology, circadian rhythms, injuries illnesses and post-case crashes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-27
Updated: 2013-06-27
Packaged: 2017-12-16 07:23:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/859453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock feels better after dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lark

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [wiggleofjudas](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wiggleofjudas/pseuds/wiggleofjudas) for the day-night discussion!
> 
> And to [Professorfangirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/works) for the bats and fireflies.

 

_“We are reconciled, I think,_   
_to too much._   
_Better to be a bird, like this one --_   
  
_an ornament of the eternal.”—Mary Oliver,"The Lark"_

 

Sherlock blinks.

The citybirds began at 4:18.

Sunup, 4:58.

Too soon.

*******

“You OK?” John calls from the threshold.

Roll over, catch the light making shade-pools under John’s eyes.

Case ended at midnight, a cloudburst and an arrest and a good gash to the forearm and a pat between the scapulae from Lestrade and a sullen eddy from Anderson and John’s yawning unflappable beside him, breathing.  Coffee. Repairs. Bow. Bed. Mistake.

Oh.

John wants to see the arm before work.

Sherlock blinks, slips it from beneath, feels John’s fingerpads on the tendons, doesn’t flinch.

“Looks all right,” John says, presses up into the hollow of the elbow, licks his lips while Sherlock looks at him.  Cants his head twenty degrees to the left.

“You’ll let me know if you feel unwell today?”

“Yes right,” he thinks he says.

It’s going to be unseasonable today, or he is.

Marginally burnt toast. A mockingbird. A scolding out there. A little shiver.

The door closes and John the cotton and dawn goes out and the day begins.

*****  
**

It’ll be oppressive until the solstice, the light like dissonance.

Dusk speaks the language of the elements. Strontium and copper. Sun going down in chlorides, sodium and cobalt. Magnesium fleck and flare even the weak dark of the city.  
  
John’s chipper in the morning, running his hands over things, nest-cleaning.  
  
But when the moon comes up, Sherlock puts his hands right where they ought to be, moonlight silvering the nails; pulls the table clear, pulls the case clear, pulls himself from day to night with a leap of what other people might call joy.

Sees ever more sharply.

*******

Before there was John it was different.

Get up, tie the ties, blood up the violin fingers.

Dull.

Tremor in the left hand. An ache and a burn.

Lanthanides looking down from the wall.

Get up.

Before it might have been a day to bring night early, drift blue through the afternoon on a raft of …

No.

*******

Not in the mood for breakfast.

*******

Bare feet and cool floor,pen rolled fretfully under an arch.

Larks and owls are rubbish.

Circadian rhythms can be changed.

Brain chemistry can be altered.

Suprachiasmatic nuclei.

He ought to know.

*******

“Are you all right?” Mycroft said.  His hands were soft on Sherlock’s jaw, breath quickening.

One of the last times he said that without irony.

Sherlock hadn’t drowned or strangled himself, though he might have, considering the water level and the type of knottage. An experiment. A bruise that looked like a collar. He was thirteen.

The evening smelled of violet and ash and pond water.

*******

His childhood is a wind-stirred night garden full of solar butterflies.

He’s never told John that, though he might guess at the tobacco flower.

At night now the chokehold recedes, ebbs a little with the skylight.

“Feeling better?” John’ll say after a case, set down a mug in the dark.

 “Yes, a bit.”

He doesn’t say why, doesn’t name the dusk.

To a man to whom it might once have meant ambush.

*******

The palace: _psych and vernacular_.

‘Black dog’ is a bit of a misnomer. 

His dog’s bright as a coin, too bright to look at.

Dead on.

*******

Leaving the flat is going to be a problem, London his lovely too loud, body twitching inward from his clothes, a rub.

They’ll set him free in the evening. Get shed of the transport and go.

His arm throbs and there’s a hot bit of grit there, retinal, coronal.

*******

_Go to bed._

His mother’s voice.

_Go to bed._

Maybe Mrs. Hudson.

The night’s like a coat.

The coat’s night, is why he loves it so.

*******

“Ha,” said Donovan, a few cases ago, “look at that, night and day.”

There he is dripping, darkness plastered to his head, coat like a wet shade, some kind of Lea-weed in his hair, possibly.

And John, sun sharding, shirt like salted caramel, dry, danger reined in, a sweet quirk, even for her.

*******

Noon.

Very ugly shadows.

Think about the moonglow of actinium.

Dangerous, short-lived.

Arm aches.

Shoulder aches.

Was it light when John was shot.

Might be psychosomatic.

*******

A dream: John, the desert touching his face, firing his bones.

A memory: John, London sundown turning fried hair-ends to gold, crease-eyed wry-mouthed about to say _brilliant._

No, sing it.

But you don’t go to war and come back shining. 

Obviously.

*******

He needs to go out.  Assam but no sugar.

Food but nothing he wants: bread, yoghurt, apple, half-pastry, cheese.

Vegetables. For soup, for twilight.

The sofa.

The laptop-cast is too blue, too bright, sky with no nimbus.

When he was child he liked the days when no-one was out.

The fields offered up the cloud-things.

The lacework spines of birds, claws, orange fungi curled in the damp.

Like ears.

*******

“These,” John said once, palming some glowing lobes, “are not on.”

He sings in the shower, not badly, but too early.

*******

It’s difficult to play the violin when one’s winged.

Aubade. _Nocturne._ Aubade _. Nocturne_.

_Serenade._

*******

Text from Lestrade.

_Need to speak with you about last night._

A brief interval.

_Not bad news._

The ping’s an offense.

_Later-SH_.

Outside on the pavement: Woman in pink suit, worried about promotion. Man, Australian obviously, meeting a lover, male. Woman in sari, green and gold, blown in the spring wind.  Daughter marrying the wrong man. Family upset.  Bright fortnight of the sixth month.  Festival. Cakes.

Transport: simmering.

*******

Murder: better at night.

Cocaine: better at night too.

*******

Sofa. Feet up, head down, then reversed.

A thought about burial, not morbid.

Dreams of a gate, a grey sky, distant green hills.

Roses like stung lips in his mother’s garden.

His arm hot with wasps.

Salt and mud.

_Sherlock,_ his mother saying,

_I told you there was a nest, just there._

He used to slip out at moonrise.

Chemistry under an arm.

Look for clues.

*******

The shower gleams like midafternoon. John’s scrubbing.

Too much to contemplate.

Cold water. Good.

Good to have a wind to lean into, a waterfall.

The larks he saw once rising from a moor, hundreds of them falling upwards, liquid wires, electrons loosed. Glimmers like all that water-light.

A twilit pool.

Safe for now.

Never delete.

*******

Text from John.

_OK?_

_Yes-SH._

Elements are eloquent.

Mercury is dusk.

Beryllium is midnight

_Want anything?_

Yes. No.

The magic hour, is what they call this.

Not idiots.

That last bit of sun.

Because we look good in it.

Because we go round it.

He slings the arm up over the back of the sofa, holds it above the heart.

*******

“Feeling better?” John asks. He’s got a newspaper and a little glint, just there, from the  window.

A slash of sun still caught in his shirt. All the flirts of the day in his face. Rather. Just John.

“Yes,” Sherlock says, brushes the tangles of twilight not from but into his hair.

John’s face does something, a cloud-shadow, five o’clock shade.

“Uh-huh.”

 John stands on toes and puts a hand flat to his forehead.

The _shape_ of his hand, four-toed, three-toned.

“All right,” John says, takes Sherlock’s good arm, “sit.”

Pushes him into the chair. Very careful. Pushes up his sleeve.  

Goes to the kitchen for something, something.

A glass, a dishtowel, his cool palms.

Rustlings and stirrings and settlings.

Even in the city the thrush and the rook.

The night comes on like a balm.

*******

“Bed,” John’s saying, “Sherlock, come on.”

The dark lifts it all, makes it bearable.

Sundowning, the grief at dusk, not his.

Might be John’s.

Try to tell him he knows.

He understands.

*******

He dreams in words.

_Diurnal, crepuscular, matinal._

Dreams in notes, Chopin nocturnes.

Dreams in pictures, the sun at lid-horizon.

A whistle, a swallow, a cough.

Life stirring in his nest.

A breath next to him.

 John coughs too, sits up, sheet slipping over clavicle.

Sherlock watches sleep sublimate. Assessment come to dew point.

Oh.

“Hey,” John says, scrubs his hair.

 Lets a hand light on him, twitches the sheet.

“Last night you … I was bit worried,” John says, shifts away, hint of hard-scarred shoulder, soft texture against, pale yellow. There are bones under there, pinions and pins.

He’ll want to go, sing in the shower.

“I ... no,” Sherlock says, puts the arm out, hand on John to stop the day.

“It’s early yet.”

John blinks at him in the beautiful light.

 

 

 

 

.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Skylark, UK, with song](http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/s/skylark/index.aspx%20skylark)


End file.
